Wickana is an Indonesian illustrator and visual artist based in Jakarta who creates surreal, metaphoric images that pair beauty with unsettling subject matter. She works in both digital media and traditional drawing techniques such as pencil, charcoal and acrylic paint, and structures her images around opposites such as light and dark or good and evil.
Wickana was born and grew up in Bandung, Indonesia, surrounded by Japanese comic books that shaped her drawing style, and horror has long been one of her interests. She studied at the art and design faculty of the Bandung Institute of Technology. During her final year there, she became interested in surrealism, citing Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and Mark Ryden as influences on her metaphorical, mysterious approach to storytelling. After graduating, she moved to Jakarta to work at an advertising agency and later settled there permanently. She began posting her work on Instagram while the app was still new, and the reach of social media brought her opportunities to collaborate with many people.
